Cristina FernandĂŠz
Dorothy Zablah
Fulvia Morales
Fernanda GĂĄndara
The Hult Prize has committed to launch a new wave of social entrepreneurs and recently was named one of the top five ideas that are changing the world by President Bill Clinton and TIME Magazine. The Hult Prize is a start-up accelerator for social good. Dedicated to launching the next wave of social entrepreneurs through identifying, funding, mentoring, advising and launching social businesses. Recently, Businessweek named the Hult Prize the Nobel Prize for Business Schools.
The Bill Clinton’s 2013 challenge: Of almost a billion people who need food security, 200 million live in urban slums. Poor slum dwellers struggle to get safe, sufficient, affordable and easily accessible food. Food security in slums is not a priority for governments, the private sector and NGOs.
Social enterprises may be the best option to address this issue. However, building successful social enterprises in slums will be difficult.
Can you build a sustainable, scalable and fast-growing social enterprise to reduce food insecurity in slums by 2018?
The challenge in numbers:
270 universities participating in 5 simultaneously Regional Finals 60 days to work on a solution 40 universities participating in the Boston Regional Finals 20 of advisors involved 4 team members with different professional backgrounds 1 Mexican university in the whole challenge
Tulán - a social enterprise - consisting of a supermarket on wheels that provides healthy, safe, sufficient and easily accessible food to low-income urban communities.
Tulán comes from Nahuatl -tlan, meaning "abundance“
Tulán is committed to creating local and global networks that will transform the available food environment for these families.
13 countries concentrate 60% of the population living in urban slums lacking food security.
These countries are looking for faster, easier and cheaper calories to solve undernourishment, exposing themselves to experience Mexico’s double malnutrition burden.
In Mexico 1 of every 3 kids aged 5 to 11 are overweight or obese. A serious undernourishment issue which in a period of only 10 years turned into a double burden of malnutrition. Mexico went from hunger to obesity in only 1 generation.
The main problem is that the people and the ecosystems are unattended. There is a need to reach out researchers, developers and producers to target unattended low-income consumers.
Tulรกn truck monthly reach
Each Tulรกn truck we will provide them with a direct channel to the BoP families, encouraging them to create healthy, high-quality and affordable products for this market. Tulรกn will give families access to healthy products that are regularly unaffordable to them. With a model designed to enable its customers to buy an entire week of pre-selected options that meet their dietary needs, in a single trip to the truck. That increases their food stability and the efficiency of their use of money and time.
To deliver affordable products, Tulรกn eliminates unnecessary intermediaries in the supply chain reducing logistics and distribution costs.
We have two strong revenue streams:
Estimates and assumptions show that each Tulรกn truck has a positive operating margin on the fourth month of operation and its payback is on the tenth month.
To achieve fast-track scale and educate our customers on how to navigate the food system Tulån will develop a tri-sectorial network with strategic partners. This network allows aid agencies, NGO´s and governments to allocate more efficiently their current resources and to focus their efforts in the achievement of common goals.
What the world needs today is connectors.
Tulån’s main goal is to find ways to connect the right food producers with the low-income urban market.
Cristina, Fulvia, Dorothy and Fernanda with Ahmad Ashkar the Hult Prize Founder and CEO Boston, Massachusetts – March 2013